Free Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris by Ian Kershaw

2:
‘eines armen, kleinen Häuslers’.
    19 . See Koppensteiner, 39–44. Jetzinger’s claim (10–12) that the name ‘Hitler’ was of Czech origin has been shown to rest on flimsy grounds. ‘Hüttler’, meaning cottager or smallholder, was not an uncommon name in Austria. See Anton Adalbert Klein, ‘Hitlers dunkler Punkt in Graz?’,
Historisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Graz,
3(1970), 27–9; Orr,
Revue,
Nr 37, 6; and also Brigitte Hamann,
Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktators,
Munich, 1996, 64. Since the various forms of the name had evidently been for decades interchangeable, it is unclear why Maser,
Hitler,
31, can be so adamant that Nepomuk (who himself had used more than one form) insisted at the legitimation upon ‘Hitler’ rather than ‘Hiedler’ as being closer to his own name of ‘Hüttler’.
    20 . Koppensteiner, 46.
    21 . Joachimsthaler, 12–13.
    22 . Kubizek, 50.
    23 . Maser,
Hitler,
12–15. One example of the sensationalism was an article published in the British
Daily Mirror
of 14 October 1933, purporting to show the ‘Jewish grave of Hitler’s grandfather’ in a cemetery in Bucharest (IfZ, MA-731 (= NSDAP, Hauptarchiv, Reel 1)). The press interest in Hitler’s alleged Jewish forebears had blown up in summer 1932, when the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
had picked up on the name ‘Salomon’ that had appeared in the eighteenth century in the official genealogy approved by Hitler. In fact, the name ‘Salomon’ had been an error made by the Viennese genealogist Dr Karl Friedrich von Frank, which he hastily corrected. But the damage was done. See Hamann, 68–71.
    24 . Hans Frank,
Im Angesicht des Galgens,
Munich/Gräfelfing, 1953, 330–31.
    25 . Jetzinger’s uncritical acceptance of Frank’s recollection (see 28–32) was above all responsible for the spread of the story. One piece of his ‘evidence’, a picture of Hitler’s father indicating his ‘Jewish’ looks, is self-evidently a portrait of someone other than Alois Hitler. See Jetzinger, picture opposite p. 16; Smith, p1. 5, following p. 24. For an early critical review of Jetzinger’s book, and, particularly, a rejection, based on the findings of the Austrian scholar Dr Nikolaus Preradovic, of his claims that Hitler had a Jewish grandfather, see ‘Hitler. Kein Ariernachweis’,
Der Spiegel,
12 June 1957, 54–9, esp. 57–8.
    26 . Klein, 10, 20–25.
    27 . Smith, 158–9.
    28 . Patrick Hitler, ‘Mon oncle Adolf’,
Paris soir
(5 August 1939), 4–5. The article amounted to no more than a largely worthless diatribe. See also Maser,
Hitler,
18.
    29 . Robert G.L. Waite,
The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler,
New York, 1977, 129 n.; Maser,
Hitler,
15 and n.
    30 . Smith, 158. Brigitte Hamann, also dismissive of the Frank story, speculates that his motive, as a long-standing Jew-hater himself, could have been to blame the Jews for producing an allegedly ‘Jewish Hitler’ (Hamann, 73–7, here 77).
    31 . It has been claimed that, as the motivation of his paranoid antisemitism, the more relevant question is not whether Hitler in fact had a Jewish grandfather, but whether he believed he was part Jewish (Waite, 126–31). The origins and sources of Hitler’s hatred of the Jews are something to which we will return. But since there is no evidence to suggest that the idea that he was part-Jewish might have occurred to him before his political enemies started spreading the rumours in the 1920s, by which time his antisemitism was long-established, there is little to support thespeculation. Concern about whether he was part-Jewish would, of course, in any case have meant that Hitler was already antisemitic. See Rudolph Binion’s review of Waite’s book in
Journal of Psychohistory,
5 (1977), 297.
    32 . According to Maser’s account of the testimony of Adolf’s remaining relatives in Spital long after the war, there was talk while Adolf was visiting Spital on leave from the army in 1917 of Nepomuk as his paternal grandfather (Maser,
Hitler,
35).